The website of the Britten Pears Foundation, based in the composer's former home in Aldeburgh, has a detailed chronology of Britten's career and background for many of his works. The BBC 4 archive has several interviews with the composer, including one in which he recalls his prodigious production of works before the age of thirteen (one tone poem was entitled Chaos and Cosmos).

The young Britten's astonishing musical ability — together with a hint of his future psychological obsessions — are evident in his Quatre Chansons francaises, written at the age of fourteen. Note in particular this setting of "L'Enfance," by Victor Hugo, in which a child's innocence is juxtaposed with a mother's suffering ("Sorrow is a fruit"):

During his American sojourn (pp. 419-21/ pp. 455-57), Britten collaborated with W. H. Auden on a musical-theater piece titled Paul Bunyan. Here is a passage from the finale, which wavers between the satirical and the slightly mystical:

One of Britten's first masterpieces was the song cycle Serenade, setting poems on the theme of sleep. In the movement titled "Elegy," Britten sets William Blake's "The Sick Rose" (p. 421 / pp. 457-58):

Here are some brief excerpts from Colin Davis's recording of Peter Grimes, with Jon Vickers in the title role. First, the emergence of the "gossip" motive ("Why did you do this"):

"What harbour shelters peace?":

The full onset of the storm:

The "Sunday Morning" interlude:

The beginning of the Passacaglia interlude, with the theme heard in the pizzicato cellos and basses at the outset and successive variations representing Grimes's boy apprentice alone, his work with Grimes, a "mistake," and the despair that follows:

Here is the ethereally beautiful chorus "On the ground, sleep sound" from A Midsummer Night's Dream (pp. 433-34 / pp. 471-72). The four chords that together spell out a twelve-note row are heard at 0:09, 0:14, 0:18, and 0:23.

Benjamin Britten conducting the London Symphony and the Choirs of Downside and Emanuel Schools; London 425 663-2. By kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes and Universal Classics.

The finale of the War Requiem (pp. 434-35 / pp. 472-73), in its 1963 American premiere:

Many other samples of Britten's music can be heard at the Boosey site.

The "breaking down the door" music in the "Babi Yar" movement of Shostakovich's Thirteenth Symphony (p. 438 / p. 476):

Nikita Storojev, bass, with Okko Kamu conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, the City of Birmingham Choir, and the University of Warwick Chorus; Chandos 8540 (follow the link to more audio samples).

In the first movement of his Fourteenth Symphony, a setting of Lorca's poem "De profundis," Shostakovich nods to his friend Britten by borrowing an effect from A Midsummer Night's Dream — double basses sliding up a major seventh and then going back down (p. 439 / p. 477). The quotation follows the lines: "A hundred ardent lovers / fell into eternal sleep." Here is Britten: